


The Light Below

by Nemonus



Series: Dark!Eriana [2]
Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Eris-centric, F/M, Mild Gore, sword-logic for the tax benefits, was it this way for Taox?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 06:15:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6789700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eriana-3 rules the dark below. In order to survive it and return to the Tower (if that is even what she wants any more), Eriana-3 needs Deathsingers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Light Below

**Author's Note:**

> “The shattered one once referred to Crota as the god holding domain in a threshold between our world and theirs. He said he deciphered the means by which the Hive call to him. From all that I've seen, I now know he was right.”

_The Ghost was dying._  
  
_It remembered how, before all of this, the Warlocks would sit on broken-legged couches and shapeless bags of cloth stuffed inside cloth, and they would debate what the Traveler was. The Ghost had heard many theories, all of which at their edges or their epicenters touched the Praxic fire in some way, since these were Praxic Warlocks. They sat with limp hands on knees on coatails and asked about the sleeping machine they lived under._  
  
_Some of their ideas about the Traveler rang true to the Ghost, and others did not. The ones that did were the most literal: the Traveler is a circle, which has curled in on itself to make a sphere. The Traveler is the Tower turned obese and frightened, a product of the Earth instead of the universe beyond it. (Such geocentric theories were frowned upon.) The Traveler is the essence of patience, shaped by gravity into a thoughtless monument to waiting. The Traveler is an ecosystem, billowed up under the pressure of its own internal atmosphere._  
  
_When the Traveler was gone, the Ghost thought of it not as a shape but as a distance. This Traveler, which had failed the Ghost, was governed by laws of inaction which were trapped inside its own tense body. The Traveler did not move back and forth over the surface of anything. It was all surface, and its surface was immobile._  
  
_The distressed Ghost had lost its Guardian. In truth, Eriana-3 had lost her Ghost. Drained of its Light, it had been carried away like a trinket by a thrall which died seconds later, and pitched down the side of a crevasse._  
  
_Eriana had never named it, although they had known one another like sisters. The Ghost did not find this a matter of concern._  
  
_The Ghost lived; it still felt Eriana’s pull, although the pull was growing fainter as the Light did. It spent most of its energy remembering._  
  
_The Ghost was dying._  
  
_But it came from the Traveler, and so it knew how to wait._

* * *

  
**1\. Feast**

Eris crouched under a fold of black rock. Her vision swam, wet coils of fog blurring in and out of the striations she knew were in front of her.  Eriana was there too - Eriana-liege, Eriana-friend, a rock and a steady point in the odd sea of the pit. The eyes helped Eris see in the dark, but if she looked too close at anything, they made it blurry.  
  
Eriana folded her indistinct arms over her tattered cloak and said, “You can sing the death song.”  
  
Eris and Toland had come staggering in from the tunnels. Even after Ir Yut’s death, the old Warlock had been distracted by the songs of the Hive, or the shine of the slime on the walls - either way, he had left. Eris - Eris had been lost in the chaos of the last push toward the throne. Hunter senses had failed her, or else something in the victory had felt like terrible, terrible loss to her, and Eris had fled it. Focusing on that too much made everything blurry too.  
  
She had discovered a different kind of focus now, in which the only thing that mattered was whether the creature in front of her was an enemy or an ally. Sometimes Hive were the former, sometimes the latter. Action, not species, seeped into her battered awareness. The sword-logic was, Eris thought, a very Hunter argument. Action over all.  
  
Eriana: not an enemy.  
  
Now, the Exo stood with her arms crossed. There was wind in the tunnels: slow breezes eddied by in the wake of tombships or opening gates, and the wind murmured at Eriana’s back at the edge of the cliff. The steep drop behind the throne was not visible, because they stood in a fold of rock out of which thralls had once swarmed, but it made itself known in the way the sound echoed over the soft wind.    
  
“There were voices in the tunnels,” Eris said, explanatory. “There were, perhaps, things freed when Ir Yut died.”  
  
She stretched her foot out and nudged Toland’s ankle.  
  
Toland: sometimes an enemy.  
  
The Warlock sat with one leg stretched out in front of him, his back curved uncomfortably against the rocky wall. His lips quirked, dislodging caked-on dust. “You understand,” he said, looking up at Eriana. “You will be the queen who rules her kingdom most completely. From this space you can survey enough to touch everything. Almost everything. You understand this, Eriana, finally.” It could have almost been a late-night conversation at the Tower, the five of them wary of hiding the exile, Toland going on about some theory so convincingly that it would have sounded like truth if it weren’t so mad. His three grafted eyes were bound with what was left of one edge of his black cloak.  
  
Eriana pointed at his throat. “I understand enough. We’re in charge here, and you’re going to help me keep that.”  
  
Toland’s smirk was slow and knowing. Then, he seemed to understand something else. He stood up and staggered. Eris considered startling, but her leg felt too heavy for her to want to stand.  
  
“Don’t worship me,” Eriana said, her voice hoarse. Rusting? “It’s obscene.”  
  
He shook his head. “Let me speak to you of Ir Yut. You will understand the meaning of her screams, will you not? She understood death. She let the Hive live immortal even without the Light.”  
  
Toland curled his lips. He was going to simplify what he said next, Eris knew, and he was going to let Eriana know it. One of them was going to have to keep up. (Both of them were going to be blessed with simplicity.)  
  
“I know that,” Eriana said. “You’ve said it before.”  
  
Toland shook his head. “No, no, it’s not the same at all. You asked us to be Deathsingers.”  
  
“I asked you to sing the death song.”  
  
“Yes, exactly. Two human voices reaching the tones one Hive throat can manage. Maybe. Maybe, Eriana, it can be done, when we are so close to the barrier. I have almost tabulated all of the notes.”  
  
“I’ve never sung,” Eris said. Never those words, no - she had never studied the way Toland had, although she had known enough to get to the bottom of the pit. She knew she could learn.  
  
“You hunted with me,” Toland said, not looking at her. “You diligence will serve us well. But to what end?” He looked sharply up at Eriana. “To wrest the armies of the Hive to your single purpose? To — ”  
  
She interrupted him. “We will survive this,” Eriana said. “We will not be mourned.”  
  
“Is that all? to not be mourned?” Toland spread his hands. “Dear Eriana, we can win.”  
  
“We must built up the court again. Replace the Hands and the Eyes.”  
  
“Yes, yes, and do it with the tithe. But you have your Deathsingers. You said so yourself, and we - we can find the songs and start the weaving, and this will protect you from death. Will it make you immortal? I do not know. We should find a way to test it.”  
  
“Do you need a jump?” Eriana interrupted, her words snapping shut over themselves like the clap in the air after a tombship disappeared. “Do you need a spark to start the ritual?”  
  
“It is not a ritual. Not in so many words. But that is … not inaccurate. An artifact of the Deathsinger would be appropriate,” Toland said.  
  
“Find my Ghost.”  
  
Toland started to speak and then stopped, surprised. “Is it still alive?”  
  
“I left it dying at the edge of a cliff. I thought there might be residue there, some spark still in it. We aren’t … a pair any longer.”  
  
Eris nodded. She had felt that, had felt the break between Eriana and the Ghost as the little machine died and Eriana charged toward Crota, leaving the Ghost trickling its Light toward his ravenous oversoul. That had been many halls and rooms away, though, before the second bridge, before Ir Yut.  
  
“It is too new to be an artifact,” Toland said.  
  
“But it can find one.”  
  
Toland tipped his head, gestured his uncertainty about the idea. He would permit the suggestion, that gesture said.  
  
Eris stood up, no longer flustered and heavy. “You have Sai’s Ghost.”  
  
“I do.” Eriana’s lights flared yellow behind her jaw hinges. They had all taken to removing their helmets, Toland and Eris because of the pain of their eyes, and Eriana - why? “Sai’s Ghost no longer draws the Light. Down here we need to draw from something else. You know that. In order to build anything back up here, we need to survive. And the Deathsinger knew immortality. So did the Ghosts.”  
  
If Eris concentrated on the muscles of her face and relaxed, her vision became less focused but more clear. Her field of vision widened. She could tell from the glow of Eriana’s lights that the room was very dark, but, the one good thing about the Hive transplant was that she could see well without light. “I planned for escape, not for survival,” Eris said. “Have we broken into Crota’s realm just to replace him?”  
  
Toland twitched, started to say something. Eriana cut him off.  
  
“The know I am not their king,” Eriana said coldly. “We will have to defend ourselves soon.”  
  
Then, she did not see herself as fully Hive.  
  
The distinction had become less important to Eris and Toland after they had scattered to the tunnels, but still they quieted. Both, Eris thought, were coming up with the best way to attack the fact that they were talking about any of this at all.  
  
Toland: not an enemy. She believed that like she would believe any of her senses.  
  
Eris said, “So we find the Ghost. Then we climb out, back to the Tower. The name feels … distant, now.”  
  
She looked to Eriana for help.  
  
Should she have expected it?  
  
“The Deathsinger was the key, wasn’t she?” Eriana said. Her cloak flapped as she gestured, revealing the jagged barrel of her gun. Their masks had gone, but their weapons had stayed - Eriana’s punchy rifle, Toland’s skull-mouthed Bad Juju, Eris’ own Murmur on her back. Eriana’s strength had always been shown best in the way that she brought the fireteam together.  
  
“She protected Crota,” he muttered. “Ir Yut was a close member of the court, kept it in balance - but the song moved through her and through Crota and through the others. Through the other world in which his soul resided.”  
  
“Then you do her work, and Eris will find the Ghost.” Eriana looked between the two of them, lingered on Eris’ gaze.  
  
Toland hunched and stepped to the side, as if he were about to leave the room at that very moment. Eriana kept looking at Eris, though, tracking, waiting, and Eris remembered her words in front of the throne.  
  
“We will both find the lost Light,” Eris said. “And we have already discussed the Darkness.”  
  
Eriana’s mouth quirked in a cruel, dislocated smile, and she nodded at Eris.  
  
Toland turned, folded his arms comfortably over his chest. “As you say, Eriana.”  
  
The Exo waited a moment, then walked back out into the open space in front of what was becoming her court. There were thralls rustling in the space before the throne, and Eriana was drawn almost immediately into a scuffle. She held two thin, white wrists and pushed the thralls apart. They were after her power, Eris knew. They were re-making their food chain, and the hesitant, hungry predators hissed and glowed in Eriana’s wake as she passed through the crowd of them.  
  
Eris’ fingers curled at the sound of the thralls screaming in desiccated throats, but she was getting used to it. There was always an ebb and flow of them in the throne chamber now, like birds in the Tower.  
  
Toland stooped to her. “And what do you suggest we do, to find this lost Light?”  
  
As soon as he had said the words, she had started to search for the mocking tone in them. It never came, though: he just kept her words in his mouth, using her definitions. Funny how rare that was, and how in the world of the Hive it built something up inside her. It brought clarity to her eyes. If Toland repeated her, she could control him, because they operated using the same words.  
  
Toland: one of her brood.  
  
 She said, “You told me of the sword-logic. What pendulums will we need to swing to fight our way to this one? Have any of us mapped that far?”  
  
Both of them felt heavy, weighed down by the eyes they had taken in the tunnels, and so they sat.  
  
They had gotten used to this: to silently sitting together, her head against his shoulder, her leg against his. The spaces there were small, and they had made themselves quiet and furious in order to blend in to the quiet and furious rocks.  
  
There was a chance, certainly, that their expedition into the pit would not have lead the way it did; but there had been significant silences even before the pit. There had been the suggestion that Eris’ priorities were aligned with his if not her morality, that they felt the same dark pattern. He had touched the edge of his mask against the side of her neck, because the space was close in the tunnel, and she watched for Hive passing along the thin, lighted corridor outside, and she had touched her hands to his waist. Things had gone this way.  
  
Now in the caves he eased back against the rocks, and Eris eased with him. Close was safe, close was comfortable, and because Toland grumbled when she leaned on his arm, she reached up and covered his ears with her hands. No masks now. No need for them. They all smelled like Hive now, and they were Eriana’s, they were the queen’s, they were the servants of the royal family. This was comfortable. This was equal parts violence and peace, sound and silence, inside and outside, thought and action. It energized both of them, and the energy calmed and focused them like colors into prisms.  
  
Toland scowled and pulled her so that her weight was on his chest instead of his shoulder, then covered his eyes with his arm and comfortably seethed.  
  
 The silence was unusual, but Eris remembered Eriana’s words and took control of it. She muttered, “We will need to go back across the bridge. The Ghost fell among the crags there, unless it was carried away. We search.”  
  
“Simple,” Toland said.  
  
“And how will we revive it afterward?”  
  
“There is energy here, even though it is not the Light. I think … let me settle here.” He repositioned his back against the wall. “Engines of Darkness run on their own strains, and there … there is where we use the Deathsinger’s music. Ir Yut sang to me the words, Eris! Some of them were lost, some of them were cut off with her head, but the secret is right here.” He touched his knuckles to his own mouth. “We will dance back and forth around the reality of death, in and out of it. We have not mapped that far. But this world respects tenacity.”  
  
 “So we fight everything?” She turned against him and pressed down on his heartbeat. Because he was leaning back already, it was just a tiny movement to expose his throat to her, and this power was what Eriana had spoken about, Eris thought. This moment, this power, was the chance to hold someone else’s death in your hands and to unbind the world —  
  
“Yes.” His voice had gone soft. He could cut even a single syllable in half, and the second half just gave up, dropped off, croaked away into the dark like a thrall. The eyes couldn’t close, so he stared up at the ceiling while he sighed. “Everything.”  
  
“So,” Eris said, and pressed a kiss into the greasy hair matting his forehead above the third eye. “One of us is going to have to win.”

* * *

**2\. Starvation**

“This will not work,” Eris said.  
  
Eriana’s Ghost had indeed fallen off the cliff. It had tumbled between two spikes of rock, which had themselves crumbled at some time in the past. Their tops were now shear, uneven white, while the remnants of their peaks were scattered in the field of boulders around them. The whole thing was thirty feet straight down. Above it ran the narrow hallway on which they stood, also made hazardous by fallen rocks and loops of chain dislodged from bronze hooks on the ceiling.  
  
“Which part?” Toland was on his hands and knees at the edge of the cliff, all black tatters and wounded dignity.  
  
“Reviving the Ghost. It has died. It is only an echo, now.”  
  
There didn’t seem to be any spark of Light in it; it was only a metal shell, tossed in several pieces off the gray-green cliff like trash.  
  
Toland stood up and dusted his hands off. “Still, we can use it. It symbolically contains the causality of the Guardians. It was a lifeline - and can still be now. Will it find an artifact?” He tipped his head from side to side.  
  
The broadness of the gesture made her wonder whether it originated out of necessity. “The eyes still pain you.”  
  
“Of course. As yours do.”  
  
She nodded, and felt the skin around her eyes pull even then. Any movement of her face agitated the join. “And you have scutes growing in. Don’t they itch?”  
  
He reached out and tapped on the top of her head. The gesture made her snarl, but there was something reassuring in the soft click of his nails against the chitin. “Yours too.”  
  
“It also won’t work because we cannot climb straight down,” Eris said, shaking his touch off. “But the Ghost is dead. Perhaps Eriana’s plan was wrong.”  
  
“No, Eris, she instructed us in this and this we must do. Use your Hunter wiles.”  
  
The cliff had begun to look slicker and more dangerous; Eris edged away. “We cannot simply follow Eriana’s orders blindly.”  
  
Toland put his back to the cliff. “That’s exactly what we need to do. She rules here. She puts the stars in order and walks into the void, and builds paths in front and behind her as she goes.”  
  
Eris could feel the truth of that, but it was only a partial truth: Eriana had not completely consumed all of what it meant to be the Hive. Toland should have been able to feel this too, and so Eris scoffed at him. “Crota did that. This is still Crota’s place. It will try to resist us any way it can.”  
  
Toland pointed at the ground for emphasis. “But Eriana is changing that. Fight me, Eris. Argue until it echoes and the echo changes the reality. You know that’s how this works.”  
  
He sounded satisfied with himself. She looked around for another way they could possibly reach the Ghost, and spied an intact length of chain that looked thin enough to lift.  
  
“Use this,” Eris said, and grabbed the chain, slipping her fingers through the rusting rings to drag it to the edge of the cliff. She heaved it over the side, where the hooked end clunked and fell and coiled in the rubble just beyond the Ghost.  
  
Toland nodded at her, then seemed to come to a decision unrelated to her. “Do not be so quick, Eris.”  
  
"We have to finish this. She asked us to get the Ghost.” He was stalling, Eris thought. He was bating her, using her anger to fuel some invisible machinery.  
  
Their anger would be so useful, if it worked. Eris said, “I am following her orders, while you experiment — ”  
  
Toland stepped off the cliff. Instantly, golden light flared and showed a webbing of rock beneath his feet. He took two more steps forward before the shelf of rock completely uncloaked, tip-toeing along the invisible pathway. Eris snarled and dropped the chain, shedding dirt from her hands.  
  
“Thank you for your help,” Toland said.  
  
Invisible machinery. Eris growled and stepped onto the pathway behind him. It had solidified now, the bronze-gold rock looking new and slick against the blue-gray of the dim cliffside. Toland faltered several times as he toed his way forward, but the path inscribed an even spiral down toward the lower surface. Just above the Ghost, a jagged hole was marked by flickers and staticky sparks in the middle of the path. Toland and Eris stepped over it while the path disappeared above them.  
  
When they reached the tumbled ground, Eris scooped up the Ghost in three pieces. Devoid of its Light and turned gray with dust, it was hardly a living thing now, hardly a reactive machine. When she shook it, though, there were flakes of blue-white light as if its fields were still working, struggling to hold its pieces together. Toland started to walk back up the ramp, and Eris looked down at her own feet as she followed, cupping the Ghost in her hands.  
  
“Eriana sent us,” she whispered. What had Eriana nicknamed her Ghost? She couldn’t remember.   “You remember her, little thing. She rules the dark below now. Does her name span the planets for you? Eriana.”  
  
The Ghost flickered, one flange pulling inward to cup against its core. The star shape was still incomplete. Eris tipped her hands, halfheartedly thinking she might guide the remaining flange to the core. She was half-way up the spiral now, Toland’s light footfalls still clicking on the stone in front of her.  
  
The Ghost’s Light strengthened, casting a blue glow onto her gloved hands.  
  
A chirp, a sob. Some small noise that went straight to the brain through the eardrums and said grief. “You are not my Guardian.”  
  
“No. I would not speak to you if you were, Ghost. I would spare you that.”  
  
Eris’ stomach lurched and her muscles burned. A wind had picked up, loud and fast, and only a second after registering that did Eris realize that the walkway had disappeared. The stone slabs hit the ground underneath her and broke into pieces, still visible, as the vertigo hit.  
  
She flailed for the chain that she knew should still be hanging against the cliff. The Ghost smacked against her hand, free-floating - had she dropped it, or did it fly on its own? The chain, though. Eris was still falling, but she saw the thick links and grabbed for them once, twice before she caught.  
  
Toland hit her back and screamed, a shoulder or an elbow digging in before he kept plummeting. She dropped her left hand and grabbed for his cloak.  
  
As soon as she got a solid grip, the impact hit so hard that she felt pain outline the joints of her fingers and her shoulders. He scrabbled at the wall, panting, then got one arm around the chain and the other around her knees.  
  
Eris had stopped breathing for a second, and by the time she recovered she saw that the Ghost was gone. She could see only one piece at the bottom of the chasm, scattered farther than before. Hunter instincts urged her to pull herself up, but Toland was still hanging on to her, uselessly, both of them flailing at the end of the swinging chain.  
  
“You have to let go,” she said, although mostly she wanted to kick him.  
  
“The Ghost rejected us,” he wheezed.  
  
“I don’t think it’s even alive any more. I saw the last of its energy.”  
  
“It’s just as you said; Eriana wants it.” But he let go. Eris clung and the chain swayed as he actually climbed down. When Eris was almost sure that no traps would spring on the ground, she turned away from him and climbed back up the chain. She did not feel regret about abandoning him to a brief adventure without ‘Hunter wiles’.  
  
She watched Toland picking up the pieces of the Ghost before boosting himself back up to where she sat on the edge of the cliff. He peered at it, then tiled the pieces back into her hands.  
  
They sat there for a while, Eris recovering, but sure that she could at least predict something about these halls. Everything would fight her, even the rocks, even the corpses of her friends’ familiars. This hadn’t been as bad as she had expected. It was almost comfortable, like any day in the Tower might have been before. The wind sighed between the black walls, and Eris stood up to continue her work.

* * *

**3\. Feast**

 “We do not need this,” Eriana said.  
  
Fresh from the cliff, hands blackened with stone chips and the brackish water that flowed over them, Eris and Toland looked at one another across the flagstones in front of the throne.  
  
Eriana had built a black stone throne for herself. Long bones spiked out at angles from its legs. Eriana paced.  
  
“I thought I needed an artifact, but I did not. I am the Will now, and already the pit listens to me. Your song is next, isn’t it? If they can listen to me, they will listen to their own music even more willingly.” As if to demonstrate, a knight shuffled up to her and sniffed at the high back of the throne. She paid it no attention.  
  
Eris heard Toland hiss at the same time as she did. She released the Ghost from her fingers, let it fall to the ground. She thought she saw a flange twitch, dark gray metal against gray stone. Had she wasted energy on this? Would her queen under the earth command her to do such a wasteful thing?  
  
For Eriana to have become a Will, though, meant that she had been truly implanted as a heart in the center of the Hive’s veins. Her influence was bleeding out, rejuvenating blackened and collapsed networks. The pit was coming back to a different kind of life after the death of its king.  
  
“All of that for nothing,” Toland said, his voice pinched. “All of that for -”  
  
“An emissary from the king is approaching,” said Eriana.  
  
Eris and Toland both startled: the sudden reality of the words seemed to echo through the chamber and through the Ascendant plane. Something just on the edge of Eris’ sight had ripples in it now, from an impact.  
  
Eriana said, “You should stay out of the way of it, since you are not yet fully formed. In this way, the king will know that I am a successor, but not the extent of my forces.”  
  
“What king?” Eris shouted, echoing. Was there another Hive warlord out there? Of course, one could hardly be a prince without a king.  
  
“The one to whom I should send my energy,” Eriana said. “The chain is broken. If we’re to have our revenge on the Traveler that lead us here, the Traveler that was too weak to save us at Mare Imbrium, the chain must be reforged. But the king doesn’t like strangers from outside the family. He’ll send the leash he once threw around Crota’s neck. Do you feel it?”  
  
A moment later, Eris did; Toland cast out with the same senses he had used to find the hidden pathways in the air, and Eris’ awareness of the Darkness was tugged along with it. This had not been what Eriana had wanted before, when she had called Eris and Toland to her service, but the nature of the work did not matter. That the work was done in Eriana’s service did. Eris could wield this like a knife, she thought, while for Toland, it was more like a book —  
  
Either way, the awareness was set before them as clearly as a vision. There was the Ascendant realm and the portals the Hive used to travel from place to place, bending reality. There was a being, lurking as if behind a curtain, between Eriana and - and what?  
  
“Oryx,” Toland said. “The Hive king Oryx and his fleet. They were far from Earth, but they are not ignorant.”  
  
“Go!” Eriana said, and waved Eris and Toland away. The Warlock hesitated, looking up as if he could see reality ripping or taste it like snowfall in his mouth. Eris took his arm and pulled him toward the alcove. He rested his chin on the top of her head, and she felt how he breathed in deep and ragged when the emissary stepped in.  
  
Oryx! (Crota’s _father, Light,_ how disgustingly unfair that there was another monarch behind the throne, how glorious the depths of the Hive’s commitment to their hierarchy.)  
  
The emissary teleported in, bringing the smell of ozone and an almost flowery redolence. Its misshapen head crowned with spikes, like Oryx’s but more crumpled or unfinished, turned this way and that before staring at Eriana. A second Hive appeared in the same flash of green light, smaller, bearing a sword.  
  
“Hello, Thalnok,” Eriana said. Her voice, when she hesitated over the name as if she had forgotten it and then suddenly remembered again, sounded almost like it had in the Tower.  
  
Thalnok stooped over Eriana.  
  
“Your lord knows what I have done here,” the Exo said.  
  
“Don’t use metaphors on him,” Toland was muttering. “Be _specific_ , tin can, don’t give it an opening.”  
  
Eriana waved a regal hand while Thalnok breathed heavily in and out, like a wind through the cavern. “I am organizing the Hive. My rule here is self-evident.”  
  
“Don’t _invite that_ ,” Toland whispered.  
  
The Hive emissary had sensed a challenge, though, had homed to it. Maybe they possessed some organ, like the magnetic neurons in the head of some birds, that let them orient themselves in the direction of violence. Violence their migration, their tithe - Eris felt energy flow through her legs.  
  
The distinction between conversation and combat lost all meaning, then. Eris saw Eriana spring up from her throne and pull her gun like a greeting. Behind Eris, Toland hissed in disappointment.  
  
Thalnok swiped at Eriana. The move was slow, almost brittle, as if the beast was afraid to break his own arm. It hit, though, scraping off of Eriana’s armor. Eriana hunched her shoulders and dimmed her eye-lights, recognition coiling underneath her anger. She and the emissary would get to know one another. They would say their sharp-edged names. Meanwhile, the sword-bearer stalked around to the right, rotating opposite the others.  
  
“We need to help her,” Eris said.  
  
Toland didn’t move. “How?”  
  
“She wanted Deathsingers, didn’t she?” Eris whispered.  
  
“Yes, but we don’t know how to bind their power to us. We never found an artifact, Eris.”  
  
She grabbed his arm again. “You know their songs. And now we have … this.” She looked up a vague gesture in the direction of the magic they had felt since Eriana mentioned Oryx. They had felt it since they had walked into the pit, really, but it wasn’t cloying any more. It wasn’t horrifying. Instead it felt clear, almost clean — but muddled, confusing. “The words themselves may be the artifacts, if we can just sing them.”  
  
Eriana was edging around Thalnok, trying to put the small sword-bearer between them. She had abandoned her throne, Eris thought in grief.  
  
Toland twitched and began to sing five tones in a steady beat, over and over. His voice was weak and wavered, but he was distorting the sounds more and more as he repeated them anyway, trying to approach the screams that Ir Yut had made. Eris started to whisper them, afraid that she would get the words wrong.  
  
The song enhanced the feeling of Eriana’s fight and the loneliness of the lost Ghost and the deepness of the chasm behind the throne; Eris could feel the energy bleeding off of Eriana and the emissary, sending messages like code out into the night. The feeling wrapped around the cavern and around the Moon and around Eris, expressing them all in a single tone. The caverns were a pit that lasted forever, a jungle on a flat world with no edges at all, and the wet, warm air of them crowded her around.  
  
Eriana ducked under Thalnok’s arm and right into the path of the sword bearer. She drove her elbow into it, but the sword came around and bit her in the back. Eriana charged forward, carrying the sword-bearer.  
  
The song made a bubble of possibility around Eriana. Each note drew her death out of her, made her death a shield around her. If she was hit, the blow would rebound against her death.  
  
Claws scrabbled against the floor as the sword bearer dug its feet in and Thalnok turned around. Thalnok moved in a reptilian lope, like a current through Eris’ minute awareness of each particle of the air. Atoms bounced off one another with tiny shocks. (Had being a Hunter been like this? That had been another world, another plane, another place with its own law. The law here bit for the throat.)  
  
Thalnok cupped one hand in the other craggy hand and swung them down at Eriana in a hammerblow. The heel of his hands struck Eriana’s shield, struck her death, and bounced off while she impaled the sword-bearer with his own weapon.  
  
Eris gasped, and the song faltered: she felt an unspoken note drop from her mouth like a broken tooth, even if she could not in the moment have said which note she sang. Toland’s concentration broke when hers did, his voice evening out. Eris screamed another note, and felt that she had placed another string in the loom but that it had not sat evenly against its fellows. She had not recovered yet.  
  
While Toland wasted breath snarling about the loss of the rhythm, Eriana turned her back to the remains of the sword-bearer. Thalnok skittered to a drum-beat stop with the sword at his throat.  
  
“Is that enough of a message for your king?” Eriana stared up at Thalnok. Pure bluster, simple anger without strategy; Eris felt a line of this between Eriana and Thalnok.  
  
The message was received. Thalnok nodded like Crota dying.  
  
The world snapped closed around him as he teleported or was tugged away. Eriana staggered, sighed, straightened up.  
  
“Was that real?” Eriana shouted. “Was it just shown to me, or was the really his message? Either way.” She breathed deeply again and threw down the sword.  
  
Toland ran four steps into the open space. “What was that? A weak, porous bubble of immortality, but we did it, Eriana! I could dance with you.” He turned, suddenly sinister. “I could dance with you, Eris.”  
  
She waved her hand in a dismissal or an invitation, tired and comfortable, and didn’t care which. He retreated to her and took her hand and started to sing something else, without rhythm and without tone, barely a song unless Eris heard it with her new senses that muddled the Darkness and the Void. The sores on her head were healing as the scutes grew into horns, and she felt the scar tissue tug but not hurt as she moved.  
  
Eris sat back in front of the throne, edging Toland away, and thought about Oryx while Eriana ascended in her tired, triumphant way back to her seat.  
  
Then there was Eriana’s plan. Revenge on the Tower. Eris toyed with the idea. Eriana still kept Sai’s Ghost, like a prize, sitting on the seat of her throne. No one had picked up Eriana’s dead Ghost from where Eris had dropped it, and she suspected Thalnok might have stepped on it. She blinked. She was too tired to go search the gray expanse for a few gray shards.

* * *

  
**4\. Starvation**

Eris sat with her back to the wall and wove her songs while Toland licked black slime off her fingers.  
  
She was learning the rhythm, had contorted herself into it, felt the song match the shapes of the sculpted caverns. The birthing-pools were spaced among the broods, enough to build the armies and the covens after the endless, endless waiting of their growth. Find the first builders of the tunnels and trace the scentfeelsight of their tithe back from the Will through the generations in and out of the pools, in and out of the song, Eris and Toland had taken that very thing to try its properties and they had found that it conducted the Hive-stuff and they would not have been able to see it if the Light had still been within them. As Toland thought, as he had planned for when he took some of the Light out of himself.  
  
They found that the amniotic sludge would sustain them if they were desperate, and they were always waiting and desperate, but only in the same way the fleet was: lonely and surrounded by, cocooned by itself and dark, Eriana the flagship out there while they watched her running lights, while Toland pushed Eris’ tattered sleeve aside and turned her arm to find the drops of ichor on the underside of her wrist.  
  
His tongue on the curve of her palm, his fingers pushing hers apart as he looked for the sheen of what was left. The beat of her blood in the song, the stone to her spine to her hand to the shattered one’s hand to his mouth. He bent her thumb back and she hissed, interrupted, beating time on the opposite knee while the words boiled in her throat - she didn’t think she had been screaming - it was a hum, a melody, a lullaby for the distant fleet  
  
(A fleet - when had that become something real? when had there been ships that were not also symbols?) Toland licked the joint of her thumb. (But of course there always had been, because the symbolic was real and what she had once been was not — it existed in another plane under another mess of stars.)  
  
The shattered one didn’t take to the hiss, didn’t take to the discordance in the rhythm. He turned her hand, gently, and firmly bit the base of her thumb.  
  
With the fading of the song, Eris was left with both her own irritability and Toland’s hungry focus. Too alone, too hungry, the whole fleet at her back and the walls tolling; a bead of black at the corner of his lips. She shook her hand free and bent to him, licked the bead and her own blood from his face.  
  
He bristled, turned so that his back was also to the wall, pushed his shoulders against hers until he figured out that she wouldn’t move and, in a moment of exhausted tolerance, gave up and slumped across her lap instead. She started to weave again, catching the rhythm more quickly because she didn’t need the walls to sing along. Draped her arm over his shoulders, and Toland breathed humid breath onto her washed-clean hand.

* * *

  
**5\. Feast**

Immortality, the writings said. Immortality.  
  
“How many days have we been alive? Is it a record?” Eriana asked. “Wei Ning used to say she went a week once, and worked the whole time.”  
  
Eris was pretending to find LaGrange points around the throne and herself. Three would be out over the abyss, and she would have to work harder to find them. There was something rewarding about simulating navigation.  
  
Toland was mapping the corridors around them. The two had become more competent at the death song, building a shield around Eriana that they could extend to different points around the throne.  
  
Eris stopped in front of her queen. The Darkness had been moving around her for — how long? “Weeks, weeks. More than weeks.”  
  
“And Oryx has not come for us. He has left me to my own suzerainty.”  
  
There was still a Ghost sitting on the edge of Eriana’s throne: not Eriana’s, but Sai’s, the one that had been recovered from the labyrinth of the pit. Eriana swung her legs down from the throne. “Are you doing well, Eris?”  
  
Eris reached up to scratch at the base of the short horns curving over the back of her head. The skin was still cracked and scabbed, and she scratched through her hair in two quick strokes that opened up the wounds. She flicked the blood and the flakes of skin down at Eriana, dusting her own body. “We are weak. We sing; we take death by the hand and by the throat. But the Hive wants us, and we cannot become wizards.”  
  
“The broods are growing,” Eriana said. “They are coming out … different. We’re all learning. Immortality.”  
  
The strength of Eriana’s conviction filled Eris’ lungs and steadied her legs. They would remake the Hive. And after that? When Eris cast into the future she felt seas and storms, salt in her mouth, the Moon’s mare flooded with the broods. They might remake Sai and Omar, Eris thought, with a slow, sure realization. Eriana had been trying to learn to regrow them.  
  
Eriana put her hand on Eris’ shoulder, underneath the spike of bone. “Thank you.”

* * *

  
**6\. Starvation**

  
Later, Eris thought she should have expected the dream. Sai's Ghost had been right there, and Eris had just stored her thoughts of it away, for her brain to do what it wanted with them.  
  
She dreamed that Sai climbed out of the dark. It was, in Eris’ mind, the same cliff from which she had pulled Eriana’s Ghost, although the shape of it was different, the light more green-black than blue-black. A golden light upended in a corner revealed Sai’s face half-staved in, one eye lost in a mess of red. The other was clear, so perfectly clear that Eris could see the blood vessels underneath the shine of the liquid in her eye.  
  
Sai’s shoulders hunched under her armor as she crawled. “You left me behind.”  
  
In the dream, Eris spoke in thoughts and intent instead of words. She had dreamed in deathsong before, but this was not the same as that. “The Hive killed you.”  
  
“And you don’t think _becoming_ them is a problem?” Sai laughed.  
  
“We couldn’t find our way out, not with three of us.” The reasoning felt hollow.  
  
How could she explain the whirlpool that was the ascendancy, with Eriana at the center of it? “Eriana commanded us all. We obey here. You saw that.”  
  
Sai levered herself up on one arm. She couldn’t seem to stand. Eris noted with horror that her Ghost was missing. “We obey? Is that all you do? Maybe think a little. You were always a smart one.”  
  
Eris crouched down next to her, better to look into the one eye and the ragged, pulped cheek. “We obey.”  
  
“I understand.” Sai smiled with half of her face. “Maybe? I understand some of it, but some of it I can’t touch. I don’t feel the rhythm like you do. If you didn’t have that, if the notes didn’t sound right, would you even be here?”  
  
Toland’s notes, Toland’s song, Eriana grown fat on the energy from them. “Stop it.”  
  
“If you looked down here weeks ago and saw people living like this, what would you think of them? Isn’t their story strange? Do they even know what they want?”  
  
Eris hissed, lashed out. Her thumb sank into the space between Sai’s eyes, breaking the skin and plunging into a shallow wound full of green goo.  
  
Sai whimpered, and Eris drew back, struck suddenly with pity and memory. She tried to make her touch more gentle, tried to pat Sai’s cheek, but Sai turned into her and Eris’ nails dug scratches into Sai’s skin. Eris tried to draw away, but Sai kept pushing, her legs ruined but some strange strength in her neck, and Eris scrabbled for purchase on something, and a string of smooth white sinew peeled out between her fingers —  
  
The world resolved around her. Eris woke up panting, thrashed free of Toland, and crawled. The rags around her were clammy, redolent. There were no screams near by her, no changes in the wind or sparks in the air. Muffled multisyllabic complaints were not a concern. As she caught her breath the muddle of sleep came back to her, and she slumped down on her elbows, her legs and ankles so weak they felt transparent. Sai was dead. Sai’s Ghost was crumbling on Eriana’s throne, and to rebuild it Eriana would draw armies of rotting flesh from the chained factories of the Hive —  
  
That eye, wet and silver.  
  
Eris rolled onto her back on the paving stones and looked up at the roof of the cavern.  
  
Toland’s notions about simplicity were not always correct. Eris had been lulled and starved into thinking that she needed to obey the sword-logic, and in that obeying she had almost forgotten that the surface of the sea existed. All three of them were fighting not only for their own survival, but against the vast bright army in the sky, and that was the army of the Guardians and that —  
  
She could go back to the Guardians.  
  
That would be a journey. One worthy of a Hunter, maybe, even if she wasn’t sure whether she was one any more. She could pass by the Hive unnoticed now, or at least until Eriana discovered her - and she had survived as their enemy before.  
  
She turned over again, determined that she would not make this decision while her brain was still fuzzy from sleep. Hunger, too — _Light_ she could have at least had the dumpling dream before or after Sai’s zombie corpse talked to her.  
  
There should have been something terrible about that, she thought. Tried to close her eyes, but the little tug of her skin around them was a nervous habit now, almost as much a comfort as closing them. When she slept, she piled cloths over her face to try to make it dark enough that the Hive-vision couldn’t see.  
  
Toland had his arm and his long black hair over his face for the same result, his mouth now still and quiet.  
  
Eris staggered into the forecourt. Eriana slept under a ledge beside the throne, and there were Wizards consulting over her now. They didn’t heed Eris, though; one looked at her and nodded, a reverent bow for the Deathsinger.  
  
Then she saw a flicker of light on the throne, and expecting a blade, crouched and edged toward the overhang. Blade indeed; a familiar knife in Sai’s hand. The Guardian sat with her knees hooked over the bone arm of the throne, the knife held from two fingers in one hand.  
  
“I am sorry,” Eris said.  
  
They could all be here. Omar and Sai, but not Vell, though: his body was probably still freezing at the doorway.  
  
When footsteps sounded behind her she knew they would be Omar’s, but she looked anyway. His chest was torn open, bleeding mostly green sparks, but blooming with green flowers and black stalks too.  
  
“I am sorry.” _Sorry you’re dead, but I didn’t kill you. I became the thing that did out of necessity. There is no other way to live down here._  
  
“We were going to celebrate after Crota died,” Sai said. “We were going to stand in front of the Vanguard and tell them it took us hours.”  
  
She took a few steps forward and slashed her hand toward Omar’s shoulder.  
  
“Is that you, Eris?” Omar said. “You look different. Did you do something with - oh, Light, Eris, you _did_ do something with your hair. Is that blood?”  
  
He faded away into black smoke with a smell like gunpowder. Eris drew her hand back and touched the side of her own head.  
  
It hurt and flaked. She would have to find Vell’s corpse to be sure she was awake and sane.  
  
Sai said, wistful, “Eriana was so good at getting people to work together.”  
  
Not a dream, Eris instincts said, suspected, accused. Just a long, long starvation.  
  
She shuffled backwards from the throne, and hummed to herself for comfort. It was a Hunter song, not a Hive one, but she was losing her sense of time. Had the song been stuck in her head for days? Did anything exist before this pit? Was there a last year in which she imagined a different year for herself? She had not imagined _this_ outcome, of all terrible things, but when she thought ahead to the coming day there were just bones and chains. There was sunshine on the angles of the Tower, once, grass green-growing at altitude in regular columns like armies. She had rifled through it with her fingers on the Tower watch.  
  
Eriana’s dead Ghost had been kicked to the edge of the court, and lay in a pile by the gray wall. Eris picked it up as she ran.

**Author's Note:**

> [End credits.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPCzSLLlVQk)


End file.
